The Breakage: Poems - Tapa dura

Glyn Maxwell's poems are adventures from the known to the unknown, seeming to take even more delight in the exploration than in the content of the lessons learned. A series of verse letters to the English poet Edward Thomas, killed in the First World War, anchors the book, but the variety of form and mood here -- from the mysteriously introspective to the overtly humorous -- is breathtaking. With this, his fourth collection of poems, Glyn Maxwell proves himself to be a contemporary master in the tradition of W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin, or even Robert Frost, whose playfulness he evokes in "Mr. F Gets Fit."

Glyn Maxwell teaches at Amherst College.